February 3, 2014

2014 Horizon Report Identifies Top Ed Tech Trends, Challenges

The New Media Consortium (NMC) and the EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative (ELI) have released the 2014 Horizon Report. This year’s NMC Horizon Report identifies the “Integration of Online, Hybrid, and Collaborative Learning” and “The Growing Ubiquity of Social Media” as fast moving trends likely to drive substantive changes in higher education over the next one to two years.

Now in its 11th year, the annual Horizon Report features the continuing work of the NMC’s Horizon Project, an ongoing research project designed to “identify and describe emerging technologies likely to have an impact on learning, teaching, and creative inquiry in education.”

In addition to projecting a timeline for education technology adoption trends, the 52-page report also identifies some of the challenges that may impede that adoption, as well as important developments in education technology as a whole. Among the six challenges identified, low digital fluency of faculty and lack of rewards for teaching (as compared to research) are considered the most solvable. the more difficult barriers are competition from new models of education, scaling teaching innovations, expanding access, and keeping education relevant. Meanwhile, experts report the “flipped classroom” and “learning analytics” as important developments with a time-to-adoption horizon of one year or less.

The NMC Horizon Report – 2014 Higher Education Edition is available online, free of charge, and is released under a Creative Commons license. Download from the NMC site here »